by Lisa Gardner
Impulsive crime, Alex kept telling her. Impulsive crime.
D.D. wasn’t sure about that. She’d just worked her way through eight different character testimonies, and each and every one of them agreed Patrick was a stand-up sort of guy. How did a man leap from steady father figure to impulsive family annihilator in five minutes or less?
Dammit, she wanted a pepperoni pizza.
Actually, she wanted sex. On her desk would do nicely. Just sweep the papers aside. Toss the files on the floor. Strip off her jeans, rip off Alex’s starched blue shirt, and go to town. He struck her as the kind of guy who would be both patient and intense. She’d like patient and intense. She’d like strong male fingers gripping her ass. She’d like the sensation of a hard-muscled body pounding into hers.
She’d like one moment when she was not Sergeant D.D. Warren, Supercop, but a woman instead.
Is this what a biological clock did to a female? Fried her brain cells, ruined her work ethic, made her stupid?
She was not getting married. She was not having children. She was not going to have sex in her office. So she might as well read the fucking case reports, because this was her life. This was what she had left. Five dead in Dorchester and no one alive to tell the tale.
She made it ten more minutes, then said Screw it and headed home. Time for a cold shower, reheated Chinese food, and a good night’s sleep.
D.D. was just pulling onto I-93 when her cell phone rang.
She grabbed it impatiently, barked out a greeting.
It was Phil; he didn’t sound good. “We got another one.”
“Another what?”
“Family. Dead. The male with a bullet between his eyes. Get over here, D.D. And bring your Vicks.”
D.D. was not a fan of vapor rub or scented cotton balls when working a crime scene. Some of the guys rubbed lemon juice on their hands, then cupped their palms over their noses. Others chewed half a pack of spearmint gum—swore that overwhelming their taste buds limited their olfactory senses.
D.D. was old-fashioned. She believed to effectively work a scene, you needed all your senses, including smell.
She regretted her high standards the second she walked through the door.
“What the fuck is that?” she snapped, one hand immediately covering her nose and mouth, the other swatting at a fly.
Alex Wilson was standing in the cramped family room. Rather heroically, he held out his handkerchief. Her eyes were watering, but she waved him off.
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered. She remained standing in the doorway, trying to get her bearings while controlling her gag reflex.
Place looked like a dump. The floor at her feet swam in garbage. She saw grease-stained cheeseburger wrappers, empty containers of McDonald’s fries, wads of tissues, and—heaven help her—a soiled diaper. Then the diaper moved and the world’s fattest cockroach streaked across the dirt-brown carpet before disappearing beneath an open pizza box dotted with green-colored pepperoni.
“Son of a bitch.” D.D. was back out the door, off the front steps, and over the edge of the property, where she willed herself not to puke in front of the crime-scene team or, heaven help her, the local news. Her eyes swam with tears. It took several gulping breaths of rain-swept August air to calm her stomach.
She had just straightened, turning toward the house to debate round two, when she spotted Bobby Dodge ducking beneath the yellow crime-scene tape at the end of the drive. Given a choice between tap-dancing with a cockroach or tangling with a Massachusetts State Police detective, she headed straight for the state cop. Who also happened to be her former lover. Who also now happened to be a happily married man.
“My crime scene,” D.D. stated by way of greeting.
“My apologies,” Bobby replied easily. They went too far back for him to ever be seriously insulted. D.D. found that annoying. The rain three hours ago had finally brought the August heat down into the eighties. It was still muggy, and Bobby had his sports jacket slung over his right arm, revealing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt embroidered with the gold insignia of the state police.
“Why are you here?” D.D. demanded.
“I was in the neighborhood?” He grinned at her. He was cute when he grinned and he knew it.
“Don’t you have a baby to tend to, or something like that?”
“Carina Lillian,” he said immediately, already fishing into his back pocket for the photo. “Nine pounds thirteen ounces. Isn’t she beautiful?”
He moved closer to one of the outdoor floodlights, holding the wallet-sized photo beneath the glow. D.D. registered fat red cheeks, narrow little eyes, and a distinctly pointed head.
“She looks just like you,” D.D. assured him.
“Vaginal birth,” he said proudly.
And thanks to those two words, D.D. thought, she would never have sex again. “Annabelle?” she asked, referring to Bobby’s wife.
“Doing great. Breast-feeding like a champ and getting Carina settled onto a nice schedule. Whole family’s great. And you?”
“I’m not breast-feeding like a champ.”
“Someone’s loss,” Bobby told her.
“Why are you at my crime scene?”
“We have an interest.”
“Ah, but I have jurisdiction.”
“Which is why I thought we could walk through it together.”
“Please—you were hoping I wasn’t here yet, and you could wander through at your leisure.”
“From plan A to plan B,” Bobby agreed.
“Tell me about your interest.”
“Marijuana,” he said.
“Dealing?”
“And importing, we believe.”
She frowned, studying him. “You think this is some kind of gangland hit?”
He shrugged. “I was hoping to walk through the scene to see if it feels like some kind of gangland hit.”
“Whole family, you know.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Lot of bodies for marijuana wars,” D.D. said. “Meth, okay. Heroin, sure. But the dope dealers …”
“Don’t like to get so bonged up, I know.” Inside joke. Cops. They had to have something to laugh about.
“All right,” D.D. conceded. “You can join the party. But I still think this is my scene.”
“Then you still have my apologies.”
D.D. made it all the way into the family room this time. Alex was no longer there, but had left an array of yellow evidence placards in his wake. D.D. held her hand over her nose and breathed shallowly through her mouth. Her gag reflex started to kick in, so she pinched her forearm as hard as she could. The pain overrode the smell. Lucky her.
Beside her, Bobby had gone quiet. He used to be a police sniper, and his ability to retreat, to be both in the moment and outside of the moment, had always appealed to D.D. Now she could feel the coiled tension in him. He was appalled but, like any good cop, focusing his rage.
In the middle of the cockroach-infested family room sat a brown-and-gold plaid couch. And in the middle of the brown-and-gold plaid couch sprawled a dead white male, duded up as a wannabe Rastafarian, complete with a rainbow knit hat. D.D. put his age in the late twenties, early thirties. He sported a dozen tremendously long dreadlocks, two large sightless brown eyes, and one small bullet hole, center of his forehead. His right arm was flung off the sofa, toward the floor. Beneath his dangling fingers, on top of a paper bag filled with God knows what, rested a snub-nosed handgun. Looked like a twenty-two to D.D.
“Not much blood,” Bobby commented.
“Probably soaked into the sofa,” D.D. muttered.
She noticed that a wadded-up tissue about three feet away was starting to move. She wondered how many rules of Crime Scene 101 she’d violate if she pulled out her Glock and went after whatever was under the tissue.
A cockroach crawled out, stopped for a second—she swore to God it was studying them—then went about its cockroach business, disappearing beneath another foul pile of
refuse.
“I’m showering with bleach when I get home,” D.D. gritted out between clenched teeth.
“Eucalyptus oil,” Bobby informed her. “Pour it straight in the bath. Works every time.” He added primly, “And it makes for very soft skin.”
D.D. shook her head. She turned away from Mr. Dreadlocks and, feeling a bit hopeless about the whole damn thing, headed deeper into the house.
The woman had gone down in the kitchenette just off the family room. The knife, bearing a black curved handle that matched the set in the wooden block on the counter, was still lodged in her back. This hadn’t been a clean kill. The grime-covered floor was further soiled with red streak marks from the woman trying to crawl forward on her elbows. She’d made it about four inches before succumbing to her injury.
The kitchen stank worse than the family room. D.D. noted rotting food in the sink, sour milk on the table, and mold growing up one corner wall. She’d seen some things in her time. She’d heard some things in her time. She still didn’t know how anyone could live like this.
Off the kitchen was the lone bathroom. Garbage overflowed the shower stall, including gallon jugs filled with yellow liquid. The toilet was clogged and didn’t appear to be working. That made D.D. eye the gallon jugs all over again, wishing she didn’t know what she now knew.
Leaving the kitchen area, they made it to the hallway. A kid, looked sixteen, seventeen, was spread-eagle outside the first bedroom door. He appeared to have been shot twice. First time in the upper leg. Second time was the money shot—a neat round hole one inch above his left eye.
Inside the bedroom, Alex was bent over the body of an adolescent girl. She was wearing shorts and a tank top. It appeared she’d been sleeping on the twin-sized bed. She’d tossed back the cover sheet, maybe hearing a noise in the hall. She’d just made it to sitting when the bullet caught her above her right eye. She’d fallen to the side, one of her hands still fisting the stained pink sheet.
This room was cleaner, D.D. noted. Impossibly small and cramped, but neater. The girl had painted the walls pink with swirls of green and blue. Her sanctuary, D.D. thought, and noted a pile of paperback novels stacked in the corner.
“Third child’s behind me,” Alex spoke up.
“Third child?”
“On the floor.”
D.D. and Bobby sidestepped their way to the foot of the bed. Sure enough, in the three feet between the twin bed and the outside wall was a small cushion, and on top of the cushion was a much younger child, probably three or four. She had a tattered blanket clenched in her fingers and one thumb still popped in her mouth. She could’ve been sleeping, except for the blood on her left temple.
“Never woke up,” Alex said, his voice subdued, tense.
“So it would seem,” D.D. murmured. “Is that a dog bed? Is she sleeping on a dog bed?”
“Looks it,” Bobby said, his voice flat.
“And what the hell is going on with her arms and legs?” D.D. had managed to inch closer, noting a myriad of fresh red cuts and faded silvery scars crisscrossing the girl’s limbs. D.D. counted a dozen marks on one dirty leg alone. It looked as if someone had taken a razor to the child, and not just once.
“Please tell me someone had called child services,” she muttered. Then realized it didn’t matter. At least not anymore.
She and Bobby slid back out of this bedroom, made it around the teenage boy, and headed for the last room. It was only slightly larger than the first. A double bed was wedged against the wall. An old wooden cradle sat beside the bed.
Bobby stopped moving.
“I got it,” D.D. said. “I got it.”
She left him in the doorway, walked straight to the cradle, and looked in. She forced herself to take her time, to spend a good two to three minutes on it. She considered this a service to the dead. Don’t rush their last moments. Study them. Remember them. Honor them.
Then nail the son of a bitch who did it.
She returned to the doorway, her voice low, steadier than she would’ve thought. “Infant. Dead. Not shot. I’m guessing suffocated. There’s a pillow on its stomach.”
“Boy or girl?” Bobby asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Boy or girl?” he snarled.
“Girl. Come on, Bobby. Out of the house.”
He followed her, because in a residence this small, there wasn’t much choice. Every step they took risked trampling a piece of evidence or, worse, one of the bodies. Better to get out, into the humid summer night.
By mutual consent, they paused outside the front door. Took a second to breathe in deep gulps of heavy, moist air. The noise had built at the end of the drive. Neighbors, reporters, busybodies. Nothing like an August crime scene to bring out a block party.
D.D. was disgusted. Enraged. Disheartened.
Some nights, this job was too hard.
“Male first, then the mother and kids?” Bobby asked.
She shook her head. “No assumptions. Wait for the crime-scene geeks to sort it out. Did you recognize Alex Wilson inside?”
Bobby shook his head.
“He teaches crime-scene management at the Academy and is shadowing our unit for the month. Smart guy. By morning, he’ll have something to report.”
“Is he single?” Bobby asked her.
“Bite me.”
“You started it.”
She gave him a look. “How?”
“You called him smart. And you never think men are smart.”
“Well, I once thought you were smart, so obviously my batting average isn’t perfect.”
“I miss you, too,” he assured her.
They both fell silent, once more contemplating the scene.
“So you think the male did it?” Bobby asked.
“We didn’t see any drugs.”
“Not in the house,” Bobby agreed. “What do you say we check around back?”
They checked around back, found a small wooden shack that looked a bit like an outhouse. Inside, bales of marijuana were stacked floor to ceiling.
“Hello, drug dealer,” Bobby murmured.
“Goodbye, gangland hit,” D.D. corrected.
“How do you figure?”
“When was the last time one dealer offed another dealer, only to leave behind the first dealer’s stash? If this was about drugs, no way these bales would still be sitting here.”
“Maybe the rival couldn’t find them.”
She shot him a look, then glanced pointedly at her watch. “We found them—in less than sixty seconds, I might add.”
Bobby pursed his lips. “If not a gangland hit, then what?”
D.D. was troubled. “I don’t know,” she acknowledged.
They both fell silent. “Your crime scene,” Bobby said finally. “My apologies.”
She looked at him, his steady gray eyes, the solid shoulders she had once let herself cry on. “My regret,” she said.
They walked back around the house.
Bobby exited down the drive.
D.D. returned to the scene.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
DANIELLE
Lucy started screaming shortly after midnight. The desperate, high-pitched shriek sent four of us bolting down the hall. We made the mistake of pouring into her room as one unit, and the sight of so many adults sent her into a fresh paroxysm of terror.
She attacked the window, beating it with her fists. When the shatterproof glass held, she whirled around and slammed herself into the neighboring wall. Her head whipped back. She cried out again, before careening across the room and pounding into the next wall. She still wore the oversized top, and it flapped around her bony knees like a giant green cape.
I put up a hand, gesturing for everyone to hold still. Technically, I wasn’t even on the clock. I’d logged out hours ago, but had never made it home. I’d debriefed with Karen, visited with Greg, caught up on some paperwork. I’d worked for thirty-six of the past forty-eight hours. Now I was tired, fraz
zled from Lucy’s escape, and wrung out from the detectives’ visit. After they’d left, I’d made the mistake of looking up the Dorchester murders on the Internet. I could picture Ozzie inside that white-trimmed triple-decker. Patrick, Denise, Ozzie’s older brother and sister.
And that put my father’s voice back in my head. “Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”
Two and half days now. Sixty hours and counting.
“She’s disassociating,” Cecille, an MC, murmured beside me.
She was right. Lucy’s dark eyes held a glassy sheen and she was striking out at things only she could see. Her nightmare had carried her to the wasteland between sleeping and waking. She was reacting to our presence, but not really processing. Kids like this were nearly impossible to wake, and it almost always ended badly.
Now Lucy flung herself against another wall and started pounding her head.
“Ativan,” Ed stated across the room. He was an older MC, heavyset, balding. He liked to cook and the kids loved him for it.
“No shit,” I muttered back.
“I can get her.” Ed was already on the balls of his feet, preparing his heft for action. He was going to rush her, try to grab her in a bear hug. The feeling of being enveloped soothed some kids, helped bring them down. I knew immediately Lucy wasn’t that kind of kid.
“No!” I grabbed his arm, stalling him. “Touch her and she’ll go nuts.”
“She’s already nuts. We gotta get her sedated before she takes everyone with her. It’s nighttime, Danielle. You know what it’s like at night.”
I knew, but forcefully grabbing a child as damaged as Lucy … I couldn’t stomach it.